Performing a search over the Internet or other networks in order to locate information relevant to the search terms entered by a user is quite often a laborious task. Typical search engines or other searchable databases enable users to search only the terms the user has entered. A few search engines and searchable databases will automatically search synonyms of the terms entered by the user. Others provide a list of related terms after a search is complete and the results are displayed, in order to enable a user to subsequently perform a further search on a related term. Searching for information in that manner may or may not provide useful results. Moreover, such searches rarely, if ever, provide a comprehensive set of search results including not only information relevant to the terms entered by the user but also information relevant to unentered terms wherein the entered and unentered terms are pre-determined to be related. The ability to automatically search and obtain information containing unentered terms related to the entered terms is helpful in providing comprehensive search results.
Providing the ability to automatically expand on key terms entered by a user as part of a query allows a search of accessible electronic files to return a comprehensive set of search results comprising relevant information that may have been missed had the query not been expanded. Expanding the query entered by a user to include related terms enables a user to obtain a comprehensive set of results limited only by the number of related terms associated with the terms contained in the query entered by the user.